Intelligent sensors with cognitive ability when wirelessly networked can be deployed in a wide range of applications. This paper reports a novel fishplate tampering detection system for railway security based on wireless sensor network. Fishplates are tampered when the nuts and bolts are loosened so that the railway lines wouldn’t remain perfectly aligned, leading to derailment of trains. The existing efforts use long length fibre optic cables which are complex to install and expensive. The smart system with cognitive wireless sensors proposed in this paper employs sensitive, cost effective and flexible piezoresistive pressure sensors which show large changes in resistances as soon as the nuts and bolts of the fishplates are loosened. These changes are processed with a MSP430 microcontroller and transmitted through the CHIPCON CC2500EM at a frequency of 2.4 GHz. Further, power saving schemes have been adopted to minimize the consumption of power along with other safety precautions. Thus the system sends early warning messages to the nearest control room whenever an unforeseen tampering act is attempted.

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7. Flex Sensor: http://devices.sapp.org/component/flex
8. MSP430 details available: http://www.ti.com/MSP430
9. Chipcon Transceiver details: www.ti.com/swrs040c.pdf
10. Switch details: scds113d.pdf
11. PMC details: slvs916.pdf
12. Buffer details: sbos266e.pdf
13. MSP430 interface to CC2500/1100: http://www.ti.com/slaa325a.pdf & slaa325a.zip
14. Cost of fiber optic cable: http://www.isp-planet.com/business/fiber_price_bol.html

Fishplate Tampering Railway Security Wireless Sensor network Flex-piezoresistive sensor Low-power mode